In the geosciences, it is not uncommon to generate models of geologic areas of interest in order to study or analyze various aspects of the geologic structure. Such models may represent various surface and/or subsurface structures. For example, when utilized with respect to hydrocarbon exploration and production, models are often generated of subsurface regions for use in identifying structures associated with hydrocarbon reservoirs, determining fluid migration characteristics, estimating hydrocarbon reserves, etc. Such models may be based upon data provided by data collection techniques such as seismic testing, geologic measurement, reservoir monitoring, simulation, etc.
An underlying geologic data set or data volume, as may be provided using one of the foregoing data collection techniques, may be processed to provide connection pathway information. For example, a web of connection pathways may be derived from geologic data sets using various techniques such as volume-based methods (e.g., multi-level seed-growing methods and fast marching methods) and network-based methods (e.g., shortest-path methods). Detail with respect to using such techniques to identify connected pathways within geologic dat a volumes is provided in U.S. Pat. No. 6,823,266 entitled “Method for Performing Object-Based Connectivity Analysis in 3-D Seismic Data Volumes,” United States patent application publication number 2007/0027666 entitled “Characterizing Connectivity in Reservoir Models Using Paths of Least Resistance,” and World Intellectual Property Organization international publication number WO2006/127151 entitled “A Rapid Method for Reservoir Connectivity Analysis Using a Fast Marching Method,” the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference.
The results of the foregoing techniques often provide a web of hundreds of connection pathways for various locations within the data volumes. These connection pathways are commonly represented geometrically as polylines in a graphical representation of the data volume (e.g., a three-dimensional (3D) Earth model of the geographic area of interest represented by the data set). For example, to facilitate connectivity analysis within the geographic area of interest a 3D Earth model image is displayed with a static connection pathways map thereon. The connection pathways may be represented by a group of geometrical polylines, wherein polyline shows the connection from one geological locations to another.
Other practices utilize a connected volume technique in which a vector is stored in each cell/voxel indicating a connection pathway to a connected neighboring cell/voxel. In this kind of connection pathway representation, an interactive streamline display may be used to show the connected relations among given points of interests within the connected volume. Detail with respect to the representation of connection pathways using connected volumes is provided in Crawfis, R and Max, Nelson “Direct volume visualization of three-dimensional vector fields,” Proceedings of the 1992 workshop on Volume visualization, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.
Useful analysis of the connection pathways within a geologic model (e.g., 3D Earth model) involves identification particular connection pathways and an understanding of the interaction or interrelationship of such connection pathways with various data objects in the model. However, the large number of connection pathways generally makes it to difficult to effectively interpret the connectivity results and to focus on the specific paths of most relevance to the analysis that the geoscientist or engineer wishes to perform. For example, a user presented with hundreds of connection pathways may be required not only to visually identify connection pathways of interest within a confusing web of connection pathways, but also to conclude which connection pathway or pathways are relevant to a particular line of analysis. Even upon visually identifying a particular connection pathway within a mass of connection pathways, the relevance of that particular connection pathway to a line of analysis may not be immediately apparent in the foregoing visual representations, such as due to interaction between the connection pathways and data objects, interaction between the connection pathways themselves, etc.